At Nature: For now, “uncertainty seems the wisest position” on the implications of quantum mechanics

In a review of science writer Anil Ananthaswamy’s Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality, science writer Philip Ball captured the essence of the sheer oddity of quantum mechanics:

What’s odd is that the interference pattern remains — accumulating over many particle impacts — even if particles go through the slits one at a time. The particles seem to interfere with themselves. Odder, the pattern vanishes if we use a detector to measure which slit the particle goes through: it’s truly particle-like, with no more waviness. Oddest of all, that remains true if we delay the measurement until after the particle has traversed the slits (but before it hits the screen). And if we make the measurement but then delete the result without looking at it, interference returns.

It’s not the physical act of measurement that seems to make the difference, but the “act of noticing”, as physicist Carl von Weizsäcker (who worked closely with quantum pioneer Werner Heisenberg) put it in 1941. Ananthaswamy explains that this is what is so strange about quantum mechanics: it can seem impossible to eliminate a decisive role for our conscious intervention in the outcome of experiments. That fact drove physicist Eugene Wigner to suppose at one point that the mind itself causes the ‘collapse’ that turns a wave into a particle.Philip Ball, “Two slits and one hell of a quantum conundrum” at Nature

Ball spends the rest of the review backing away from the implication that the mind is real but, that said, his is a good summary and he ends by recommending that pluralism is currently well-advised: “For now, uncertainty seems the wisest position in the quantum world.”

37 Replies to “At Nature: For now, “uncertainty seems the wisest position” on the implications of quantum mechanics”

The implication is not just that the mind is real but also that physical “reality” is subordinate to mind. The real difficulty here is that most theories of mind begin from the materialistic premise that it is “physical reality” that forms or informs the mind.

I just finished reading “What Is Real: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Mechanics”, a history of various interpretations of quantum mechanics, including questions of exactly what is real, what is the role of measurement, and how, specifically, has the Copenhagen interpretation fared against other interpretations in light of further experiments in QM.

In the summary, Becker wrote this:

While the different possibilities laid out in this book are the most significant historically, and they are all mostly still around in various forms (minus Wigner’s consciousness-based proposal, which has been dismissed as needlessly speculative and vague, and in danger of collapsing into solipsism), many, many more have been proposed in the past thirty years.

Excerpt From: Adam Becker. “What Is Real?.” iBooks

I just posted more on this subject in the “WJM throws down the gauntlet” tread.

P.S. I definitely agree with the title of this thread. Trying to interpret what QM “really” means is an exercise in unprovable metaphysics. I think we need to live with the uncertainty of understanding that the ambiguities of QM are what they are, and may not ever resolve into a definite understanding of what “really” is behind the quantum world we can investigate.

That local reality has been disproved is as settled as “disproved” and as “settled” as things get in the provisional nature of science. That photons and electrons are affected by conscious observation and not mere interaction with supposed physical surroundings is as settled as it gets in science.

Just because materialism-committed physicists don’t like what the evidence implies doesn’t change any of that, as you allude to as you contniue:

and that prominent QM theorists have objected to this idea on the grounds that it leads to solipsism.

They object to this rational implication of the evidence on the grounds that they dislike where they think the implication leads.

These same issues pertain to wjm’s thesis: if five people all report seeing that the rock broke the window, even though each person’s experience of that perception is available only to themself, the consensual agreement about what they saw is strong evidence that there is in fact a rock and a window external to themself.

Yes, it is. I’ve never said otherwise. Just because the theory of an external reality is good at explaining a lot of evidence/experience doesn’t mean it is true. Insisting that evidence repeatedly gathered and proved via further experimentation doesn’t mean what it rationally indicates – that the external reality model is wrong – is displaying ideological commitment to the external reality model. It’s like clinging to the geocentric model when evidence clearly demonstrates that view is wrong.

Yes, what we experience is mediated by the nature and capabilities of our senses (for instance, we could in theory see more of the electromagnetic spectrum to that the color of the rock would be different), so we can’t know the “thing-in-itself”: we can only know that thing as it appears to us (as Kant explained).But that doesn’t mean that the thing-in-itself doesn’t have an independent reality.

No, but the quantum evidence that has disproved local reality has demonstrated exactly that very thing. It doesn’t render the “exterior reality” model unusable; it just means that what we experience is not what that model describes and that there are phenomena that do not fit that model. Unfortunately for external realists, that non-fitting phenomena is the deep foundation of all of what we experience as an “external physical reality”.

The double slit has now been performed with ‘objects’ much larger than electrons.

Double-slit superposition for objects as large as protein molecules:
Matter-wave physics with nanoparticles and biomolecules – March 2017
Excerpt page 1: Double- and multi-slit diffraction experiments with massive matter have been realized with electrons [3], neutrons [4], atoms [5, 6] and their clusters [7], as well as small [8] and large molecules [9]. The combination of several diffraction elements into full matter-wave interferometers allowed accessing states of increasing macroscopicity: Nowadays, it is possible to delocalize individual atoms on the half-meter scale [10] and to demonstrate spatial superposition states from single electrons [11] up to organic molecules exceeding 10^4 amu [12]. All studies together already span a factor of 10^7 in mass and are still fully consistent with Schrodinger’s quantum mechanics, as developed 90 years ago [13].
In our present lecture we report on explorations of quantum physics with strongly bound, warm objects of high internal complexity. We study matter-wave interference of organic nanomatter that may bind dozens or beyond a thousand atoms into one single quantum object [14, 15].,,,
Excerpt page 13: Figure 7. The functionalized porphyrin TPPF20 (left) is the largest object for which matter-wave interference has been observed so far. It compares in complexity and mass with insulin (middle) or cytochrome C (right). The extension of TPPF20 can reach up to 50 A.https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.02129.pdf

In the following video, Anton Zeilinger, a leading experimentalist in quantum mechanics, states that

“The path taken by the photon is not an element of reality. We are not allowed to talk about the photon passing through this or this slit. Neither are we allowed to say the photon passes through both slits. All this kind of language is not applicable.”
– Anton Zeilinger
Quantum Mechanics – Double Slit Experiment. Is anything real? (Prof. Anton Zeilinger) – videohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayvbKafw2g0

And in this following video, Anton Zeilinger goes on to state that

“We know what the particle is doing at the source when it is created. We know what it is doing at the detector when it is registered. But we do not know what it is doing in-between.”
– Anton Zeilinger
Prof Anton Zeilinger Shows the Double-slit Experiment – videohttp://www.dailymotion.com/vid.....iment_tech

Yet contrary to Zeilinger’s claim that “We know what the particle is doing at the source when it is created. We know what it is doing at the detector when it is registered. But we do not know what it is doing in-between.”, the fact of the matter is that not only do we not know what the photon is doing in between in the double slit experiment as it is traveling we really don’t even know how photons are emitted and absorbed in the first place.
This following wikipedia article on quantum electrodynamics states that ‘It is important not to over-interpret these diagrams. Nothing is implied about how a particle gets from one point to another. The diagrams do not imply that the particles are moving in straight or curved lines. They do not imply that the particles are moving with fixed speeds. The fact that the photon is often represented, by convention, by a wavy line and not a straight one does not imply that it is thought that it is more wavelike than is an electron. The images are just symbols to represent the actions above: photons and electrons do, somehow, move from point to point and electrons, somehow, emit and absorb photons. We do not know how these things happen, but the theory tells us about the probabilities of these things happening.’

Quantum Electrodynamics
The key components of Feynman’s presentation of QED are three basic actions.[1]:85
*A photon goes from one place and time to another place and time.
*An electron goes from one place and time to another place and time.
*An electron emits or absorbs a photon at a certain place and time.
These actions are represented in a form of visual shorthand by the three basic elements of Feynman diagrams: a wavy line for the photon, a straight line for the electron and a junction of two straight lines and a wavy one for a vertex representing emission or absorption of a photon by an electron. These can all be seen in the adjacent diagram.It is important not to over-interpret these diagrams. Nothing is implied about how a particle gets from one point to another. The diagrams do not imply that the particles are moving in straight or curved lines. They do not imply that the particles are moving with fixed speeds. The fact that the photon is often represented, by convention, by a wavy line and not a straight one does not imply that it is thought that it is more wavelike than is an electron. The images are just symbols to represent the actions above: photons and electrons do, somehow, move from point to point and electrons, somehow, emit and absorb photons. We do not know how these things happen, but the theory tells us about the probabilities of these things happening.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_electrodynamics#Introduction

And although, according to Anton Zeilinger, we cannot know exactly what the photon is doing in the double slit experiment between emission and absorption, we do know that while a photon is doing whatever it is doing in the double slit, that the photon is mathematically defined as being in an infinite dimensional state,,,

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences – Eugene Wigner – 1960
Excerpt: We now have, in physics, two theories of great power and interest: the theory of quantum phenomena and the theory of relativity.,,, The two theories operate with different mathematical concepts: the four dimensional Riemann space and the infinite dimensional Hilbert space,http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc.....igner.html

Wave function
Excerpt “wave functions form an abstract vector space”,,, This vector space is infinite-dimensional, because there is no finite set of functions which can be added together in various combinations to create every possible function.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.....ctor_space

,, an infinite dimensional state that also takes an infinite amount of information to describe properly.

Explaining Information Transfer in Quantum Teleportation: Armond Duwell †‡ University of Pittsburgh
Excerpt: In contrast to a classical bit, the description of a (quantum) qubit requires an infinite amount of information. The amount of information is infinite because two real numbers are required in the expansion of the state vector of a two state quantum system (Jozsa 1997, 1)http://www.cas.umt.edu/phil/fa.....lPSA2K.pdf

Quantum Computing – Stanford Encyclopedia
Excerpt: Theoretically, a single qubit can store an infinite amount of information, yet when measured (and thus collapsing the superposition of the Quantum Wave state) it yields only the classical result (0 or 1),,,http://plato.stanford.edu/entr.....tcomp/#2.1

WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? Infinity – Max Tegmark
Excerpt: real numbers with their infinitely many decimals have infested almost every nook and cranny of physics, from the strengths of electromagnetic fields to the wave functions of quantum mechanics: we describe even a single bit of quantum information (a qubit) using two real numbers involving infinitely many decimals.https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25344

Moreover, Richard Feynman, in his role in developing Quantum-Electrodynamics, which is a mathematical theory in which special relativity and quantum mechanics are unified,

Theories of the Universe: Quantum Mechanics vs. General Relativity
Excerpt: The first attempt at unifying relativity and quantum mechanics took place when special relativity was merged with electromagnetism. This created the theory of quantum electrodynamics, or QED. It is an example of what has come to be known as relativistic quantum field theory, or just quantum field theory. QED is considered by most physicists to be the most precise theory of natural phenomena ever developed.http://www.infoplease.com/cig/.....ivity.html

,, Richard Feynman was only able to unify special relativity and quantum mechanics in quantum electrodynamics by quote unquote “brushing infinity under the rug” by a technique called Renormalization

THE INFINITY PUZZLE: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe
Excerpt: In quantum electrodynamics, which applies quantum mechanics to the electromagnetic field and its interactions with matter, the equations led to infinite results for the self-energy or mass of the electron. After nearly two decades of effort, this problem was solved after World War II by a procedure called renormalization, in which the infinities are rolled up into the electron’s observed mass and charge, and are thereafter conveniently ignored. Richard Feynman, who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga for this breakthrough, referred to this sleight of hand as “brushing infinity under the rug.”http://www.americanscientist.o.....g-infinity

In the following video, Richard Feynman rightly expresses his unease with “brushing infinity under the rug” in Quantum-Electrodynamics:

“It always bothers me that in spite of all this local business, what goes on in a tiny, no matter how tiny, region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time, according to laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out. Now how can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one stinky tiny bit of space-time is going to do?”
– Richard Feynman – one of the founding fathers of QED (Quantum Electrodynamics)
Quote taken from the 6:45 minute mark of the following video:
Feynman: Mathematicians versus Physicists – videohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obCjODeoLVw

I don’t know about Richard Feynman, but as for myself, being a Christian Theist, I find it rather comforting to know that it takes an ‘infinite amount of logic to figure out what one stinky tiny bit of space-time is going to do’:

“Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one stinky tiny bit of space-time is going to do?”
– Richard Feynman

The reason why I find it rather comforting is because of John 1:1, which says “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” ‘The Word’ in John 1:1 is translated from ‘Logos’ in Greek. Logos also happens to be the root word from which we derive our modern word logic.

John1:1
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

of note: ‘the Word’ in John 1:1 is translated from ‘Logos’ in Greek. Logos is also the root word from which we derive our modern word logichttp://etymonline.com/?term=logic

So that it would take an infinite amount of logic to know what tiny bit of spacetime is going to do is pretty much exactly what one should expect to see under Christian presuppositions.
In fact, as a Christian Theist, I find both the double slit and quantum electrodynamics to be extremely comforting for Christian concerns. In the double slit experiment we found that while a photon and/or electron is traveling in the double slit experiment it is mathematically required to be defined as being in an infinite dimensional space.
And we found that the photon is also mathematically required to be described by an infinite amount of information.

Now, saying something is in an infinite dimensional state to me, as a Christian Theist, sounds very much like the theistic attribute of omnipresence.

And then saying something takes an infinite amount of information to describe it sounds very much like the Theistic attribute of Omniscience to me.

And then we also saw that when Quantum Mechanics and special relativity were unified in quantum-electrodynamics that it still took an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one stinky tiny bit of space-time is going to do.

Now all this is pretty much exactly what we would expect to see under Christian presuppositions. But, on the other hand, under Atheistic materialism and/or naturalism, and the presuppositions therein, there simply is no rational explanation for why we should find these things to be as they are.

Moreover, the basics of quantum wave collapse dovetail perfectly into some of the oldest philosophical arguments that were made by Aristotle and Aquinas for the existence of God, and even offers empirical confirmation for those ancient philosophical arguments.’

What Is Matter? The Aristotelian Perspective – Michael Egnor – July 21, 2017
Excerpt: Heisenberg, almost alone among the great physicists of the quantum revolution, understood that the Aristotelian concept of potency and act was beautifully confirmed by quantum theory and evidence.,,,
Heisenberg wrote:
,,,The probability wave of Bohr, Kramers, Slater… was a quantitative version of the old concept of “potentia” in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality…The probability function combines objective and subjective elements,,,
Thus, the existence of potential quantum states described by Schrodinger’s equation (which is a probability function) are the potency (the “matter”) of the system, and the collapse of the quantum waveform is the reduction of potency to act. To an Aristotelian (like Heisenberg), quantum mechanics isn’t strange at all.https://evolutionnews.org/2017/07/what-is-matter-the-aristotelian-perspective/

Here is a technical explanation and video of Aquinas’ First way argument for God where you can, at your leisure, see just how well the argument from motion dovetails into what we are seeing in quantum mechanics

Aquinas’ First Way
1) Change in nature is elevation of potency to act.
2) Potency cannot actualize itself, because it does not exist actually.
3) Potency must be actualized by another, which is itself in act.
4) Essentially ordered series of causes (elevations of potency to act) exist in nature.
5) An essentially ordered series of elevations from potency to act cannot be in infinite regress, because the series must be actualized by something that is itself in act without the need for elevation from potency.
6) The ground of an essentially ordered series of elevations from potency to act must be pure act with respect to the casual series.
7) This Pure Act– Prime Mover– is what we call God.http://egnorance.blogspot.com/.....t-way.html

When I wrote, “I definitely agree with the title of this thread. Trying to interpret what QM “really” means is an exercise in unprovable metaphysics.”, you replied

I feel much the same way about arguing that consensual experience “means” that an external reality exists – unless one just uses it as a provisional model, it’s metaphysical ideology.

In my opinion, all interpretations about metaphysics, including what is “really real” in respect to QM, is a provisional model. I certainly don’t think I hold to any ideology about the situation, and even though I think you were referring to others, I don’t hold a “materialist-committed” position.

You write,

That local reality has been disproved is as settled as “disproved” and as “settled” as things get in the provisional nature of science. That photons and electrons are affected by conscious observation and not mere interaction with supposed physical surroundings is as settled as it gets in science.

I agree with your statement about local reality. (You’ll note that my quote in the “gauntlet” thread quotes John Bell on this issue.) I’ll also agree that quantum phenomena are affected by conscious observation. I don’t think it is a settled issue, however, that quantum phenomena are not affected by “mere interaction with supposed physical surroundings”.

When I wrote, “prominent QM theorists have objected to this idea on the grounds that it leads to solipsism”, you replied,

They object to this rational implication of the evidence on the grounds that they dislike where they think the implication leads.

This is most likely because they see flaws in those implications, not because the “don’t like” those implications.

There is a difference here between claiming that the ultimate nature of quantum phenomena is unknowable by us and claiming that the evidence supports the conclusion that consciousness is a necessary prerequisite for quantum phenomena to be the foundation of an external reality. Of course consciousness is necessary for us to experience the world, but that doesn’t mean that consciousness is necessary for the world to exist.

Somewhat related: in googling “Bell” and “local reality” I found this interesting article:

For several years now WJM has clearly articulated the need for mind to be considered primary in reality.

“In any philosophy of reality that is not ultimately self-defeating or internally contradictory, mind – unlabeled as anything else, matter or spiritual – must be primary. What is “matter” and what is “conceptual” and what is “spiritual” can only be organized from mind. Mind controls what is perceived, how it is perceived, and how those percepts are labeled and organized. Mind must be postulated as the unobserved observer, the uncaused cause simply to avoid a self-negating, self-conflicting worldview. It is the necessary postulate of all necessary postulates, because nothing else can come first. To say anything else comes first requires mind to consider and argue that case and then believe it to be true, demonstrating that without mind, you could not believe that mind is not primary in the first place.”
– William J. Murray

WJM is in VERY good company:

“No, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
Max Planck (1858–1947), the main founder of quantum theory, The Observer, London, January 25, 1931

“The principal argument against materialism is not that illustrated in the last two sections: that it is incompatible with quantum theory. The principal argument is that thought processes and consciousness are the primary concepts, that our knowledge of the external world is the content of our consciousness and that the consciousness, therefore, cannot be denied. On the contrary, logically, the external world could be denied—though it is not very practical to do so. In the words of Niels Bohr, “The word consciousness, applied to ourselves as well as to others, is indispensable when dealing with the human situation.” In view of all this, one may well wonder how materialism, the doctrine that “life could be explained by sophisticated combinations of physical and chemical laws,” could so long be accepted by the majority of scientists.”
– Eugene Wigner, Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, pp 167-177.

Max Planck went on to state:

“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”
Max Planck – The main originator of Quantum Theory – Das Wesen der Materie [The Nature of Matter], speech at Florence, Italy (1944) (from Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Abt. Va, Rep. 11 Planck, Nr. 1797)

Even Heinsenberg himself weighed in with a very Theistic friendly interpretation of quantum mechanics:

“I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”
Werner Heisenberg – As quoted in The New York Times Book Review (March 8, 1992). – “Uncertainty,” David C. Cassidy’s biography of my father, Werner Heisenberg

Moreover, another towering giant of physics, Einstein himself, was shown to be wrong in his opposition to quantum mechanics.

Most people are aware of the falsification of Einstein’s ‘hidden variables’ model that tried to explain away the ‘spooky action at a distance’ of quantum entanglement,,,

Einstein vs quantum mechanics, and why he’d be a convert today – Margaret Reid – June 13, 2014
Excerpt: Resolving spooky action
Einstein’s argument illustrated the contradiction between quantum mechanics as we know it and the assumption of “no-spooky-action-at-a-distance”. Einstein’s belief was to resolve the problem in the simplest way: to introduce hidden variables consistent with no spooky action that would complete quantum mechanics.
Of course, by far the simplest resolution would be that Einstein’s entanglement simply doesn’t exist in nature.
In a nutshell, experimentalists John Clauser, Alain Aspect, Anton Zeilinger, Paul Kwiat and colleagues have performed the Bell proposal for a test of Einstein’s hidden variable theories. All results so far support quantum mechanics. It seems that when two particles undergo entanglement, whatever happens to one of the particles can instantly affect the other, even if the particles are separated!http://phys.org/news/2014-06-e.....today.html

,, but fewer people are aware that Einstein was also falsified in his belief that “The experience of ‘the now’ cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement, it can never be a part of physics.”

“The experience of ‘the now’ cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement, it can never be a part of physics.”
– Albert Einstein
Quote was taken from the last few minutes of this following video.
Stanley L. Jaki: “The Mind and Its Now”https://vimeo.com/10588094

A fuller meaning of exactly what is meant by ‘the experience of ‘the now” can be read in the following article:

The Mind and Its Now – Stanley L. Jaki, May 2008
Excerpts: There can be no active mind without its sensing its existence in the moment called now.,,,
Three quarters of a century ago Charles Sherrington, the greatest modern student of the brain, spoke memorably on the mind’s baffling independence of the brain. The mind lives in a self-continued now or rather in the now continued in the self. This life involves the entire brain, some parts of which overlap, others do not.
,,,There is no physical parallel to the mind’s ability to extend from its position in the momentary present to its past moments, or in its ability to imagine its future. The mind remains identical with itself while it lives through its momentary nows.
,,, the now is immensely richer an experience than any marvelous set of numbers, even if science could give an account of the set of numbers, in terms of energy levels. The now is not a number. It is rather a word, the most decisive of all words. It is through experiencing that word that the mind comes alive and registers all existence around and well beyond.
,,, All our moments, all our nows, flow into a personal continuum, of which the supreme form is the NOW which is uncreated, because it simply IS.http://metanexus.net/essay/mind-and-its-now

Yet, ‘the experience of the now’ is, contrary to what Einstein thought possible, very much a part of experimental physics. For example, in the following experiment, that was performed with atoms instead of photons, it was proved that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”

Experiment confirms quantum theory weirdness – May 27, 2015
Excerpt: The bizarre nature of reality as laid out by quantum theory has survived another test, with scientists performing a famous experiment and proving that reality does not exist until it is measured.
Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have conducted John Wheeler’s delayed-choice thought experiment, which involves a moving object that is given the choice to act like a particle or a wave. Wheeler’s experiment then asks – at which point does the object decide?
Common sense says the object is either wave-like or particle-like, independent of how we measure it. But quantum physics predicts that whether you observe wave like behavior (interference) or particle behavior (no interference) depends only on how it is actually measured at the end of its journey. This is exactly what the ANU team found.
“It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” said Associate Professor Andrew Truscott from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering.
Despite the apparent weirdness, the results confirm the validity of quantum theory, which,, has enabled the development of many technologies such as LEDs, lasers and computer chips.
The ANU team not only succeeded in building the experiment, which seemed nearly impossible when it was proposed in 1978, but reversed Wheeler’s original concept of light beams being bounced by mirrors, and instead used atoms scattered by laser light.
“Quantum physics’ predictions about interference seem odd enough when applied to light, which seems more like a wave, but to have done the experiment with atoms, which are complicated things that have mass and interact with electric fields and so on, adds to the weirdness,” said Roman Khakimov, PhD student at the Research School of Physics and Engineering.http://phys.org/news/2015-05-q.....dness.html

The Theistic implications of this experiment are fairly obvious. As Professor Scott Aaronson quipped, “Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists,,, But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!”

“Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists who think the world sprang into existence on October 23, 4004 BC at 9AM (presumably Babylonian time), with the fossils already in the ground, light from distant stars heading toward us, etc. But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!”
– Scott Aaronson – MIT associate Professor quantum computation – Lecture 11: Decoherence and Hidden Variables

Thus, contrary to Einstein falsely claiming that ‘the experience of ‘the now’ can never be a part of physics, the fact of the matter is that ‘the experience of the now’, as far as quantum mechanics itself is concerned, is very much a part of modern day experimental physics.

And as was stated at post 2 by Dick “Somewhere, George Berkeley (1685-1753) is smiling.”

George Berkeley’s primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called “immaterialism” (later referred to as “subjective idealism” by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers and, as a result, cannot exist without being perceived.,,,
George Berkeley,,,, A convinced adherent of Christianity, Berkeley believed God to be present as an immediate cause of all our experiences.,,,
Berkeley believed that God is not the distant engineer of Newtonian machinery,,,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley

Divine Action and the World of Science: What Cosmology and Quantum Physics Teach Us about the Role of Providence in Nature – Bruce L. Gordon – 2017
Excerpt page 295: [T]he reality of a substance must include something intrinsic and qualitativeover and above any formal or structural features it may possess.117
When we consider the fact that the structure of reality in fundamental physical theory is merely phenomenological and that this structure itself is hollow and non-qualitative, whereas our experience is not, the metaphysical objectivity and epistemic intersubjectivity of the enstructured qualitative reality of our experience can be seen to be best explained by an occasionalist idealism of the sort advocated by George Berkeley (1685-1753) or Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). In the metaphysical context of this kind of theistic immaterialism, the vera causa that brings coherent closure to the phenomenological reality we inhabit is always and only agent causation. The necessity of causal sufficiency is met by divine action, for as Plantinga emphasizes:
[T]he connection between God’s willing that there be light and there being light is necessary in the broadly logical sense: it is necessary in that sense that if God wills that p, p occurs. Insofar as we have a grasp of necessity (and we do have a grasp of necessity), we also have a grasp of causality when it is divine causality that is at issue. I take it this is a point in favor of occasionalism, and in fact it constitutes a very powerful advantage of occasionalism. 118http://jbtsonline.org/wp-conte.....ressed.pdf

A few more notes that are very friendly to George Berkeley’s Theistic concerns

“The concept of the objective reality of the elementary particles has thus evaporated…”,,,; “The idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist, independently of whether or not we observe them,,, is impossible.,,, We can no longer speak of the behavior of the particle independently of the process of observation”
– W. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, Harper and Row, New York (1958)

“No phenomenon is a physical phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”
— John Wheeler
Quoted in Robert J. Scully, The Demon and the Quantum (2007), 191

Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger by Richard Conn Henry – Physics Professor – John Hopkins University
Excerpt: Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the “illusion” of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism (solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist). (Dr. Henry’s referenced experiment and paper – “An experimental test of non-local realism” by S. Gröblacher et. al., Nature 446, 871, April 2007 – “To be or not to be local” by Alain Aspect, Nature 446, 866, April 2007 (Leggett’s Inequality: Violated, as of 2011, to 120 standard deviations)http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/aspect.html

Yes, ba, there are people who support this interpretation. There are those that don’t. You don’t collect quotes from those who don’t, do you?

As I have said, here I use wjm’s words, all these interpretations are “provisional models” of metaphysics, subject to considerable well-informed disagreement (and in my opinion, at least to some extent, a matter of philosophical choice but not something that can be shown to be “true”.)

Within my limited understanding of QM, it seems that the jury is still out concerning the materialist-vs-idealist implications.

FWIW I tend to side with the idealists. This is because the long human history of ‘altered states of consciousness'(ASCs), in which the human mind seems to expand infinitely, describes a scenario almost identical with an idealist interpretation of quantum-mrchanical reality.

Whether the ASC was that of mystics such as Yeshua Ben Yosef (“Jesus”) after his 40 days and nights of fasting; or the transcendent visions of near-death experiencers, or the accounts of 5-MeO-DMT psychonauts, or the insights of people trained in deep meditation, the bottom line is the same: mind creates everything and mind IS everything.

(Also, the contemporary computer scientist and philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, following in Berkeley’s footsteps, has written several books and papers explaining why idealism is a more parsimonious interpretation of reality than is materialism, and thus – following Occam’s razor – is more likely to be true. His latest book “The Idea of a World” has just been published.)

Evidence for the correct interpretation of QM will eventually accumulate, just as evidence gradually accumulated to solve the geocentric-vs-heliocentric debate. We live in exciting times!

“just as evidence gradually accumulated to solve the geocentric-vs-heliocentric debate.”

If you told somebody that you believe the Earth, or any particular human on the earth was the center of the universe, their initial reaction would most likely be to laugh you to scorn and then tell you that everybody with half a brain knows that the Earth is revolving around the sun and that Ptolemy’s earth centered model was proven wrong.

If they are a little more educated they might inform you of the supposedly incontrovertible fact that we are whirling around the center of our galaxy at an incredibly fast pace, and that our galaxy is itself moving with great speed through space,,,

How fast is the earth moving? –
Rhett Herman, a physics professor at Radford University in Virginia, supplies the following answer:
Excerpt: ,,, As schoolchildren, we learn that the earth is moving about our sun in a very nearly circular orbit. It covers this route at a speed of nearly 30 kilometers per second, or 67,000 miles per hour. In addition, our solar system–Earth and all–whirls around the center of our galaxy at some 220 kilometers per second, or 490,000 miles per hour. As we consider increasingly large size scales, the speeds involved become absolutely huge!
The galaxies in our neighborhood are also rushing at a speed of nearly 1,000 kilometers per second towards a structure called the Great Attractor,,,
Each of the motions described above were given relative to some structure. Our motion about our sun was described relative to our sun, while the motion of our local group of galaxies was described as toward the Great Attractor.,,,https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-fast-is-the-earth-mov/

This belief that the earth and/or humans have no special position or status within the universe is referred to as the Copernican Principle and/or the mediocrity principle. The Copernican principle, is named after Copernican heliocentrism and is an assumption that there is nothing very unusual or special about the earth or humanity:

Copernican principle
Excerpt: In physical cosmology, the Copernican principle, is an alternative name of the mediocrity principle,,, stating that humans (the Earth, or the Solar system) are not privileged observers of the universe.[1]
Named for Copernican heliocentrism, it is a working assumption that arises from a modified cosmological extension of Copernicus’s argument of a moving Earth.[2] In some sense, it is equivalent to the mediocrity principle.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_principle

Mediocrity principle
Excerpt: The (Mediocrity) principle has been taken to suggest that there is nothing very unusual about the evolution of the Solar System, Earth’s history, the evolution of biological complexity, human evolution, or any one nation. It is a heuristic in the vein of the Copernican principle, and is sometimes used as a philosophical statement about the place of humanity. The idea is to assume mediocrity, rather than starting with the assumption that a phenomenon is special, privileged, exceptional, or even superior.[2][3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle

That is to say, with the removal of the earth from the center of the solar system (and the center of the universe in general), some people generalized it to mean humans in general have no real meaning, purpose, and significance in this universe.

Yet, this belief that the earth, and humans in particular are not ‘special’ in this universe, is now shown to be wrong.

Contrary to what is believed by the vast majority of people today, apparently by both Christians and atheists alike, recent advances in science have restored the earth and humanity to a special, even central, position within the universe.

First off, in the 4 dimensional spacetime of Einstein’s General Relativity, we find that each 3-Dimensional point in the universe is central to the expansion of the universe,,,

Where is the centre of the universe?:
Excerpt: There is no centre of the universe! According to the standard theories of cosmology, the universe started with a “Big Bang” about 14 thousand million years ago and has been expanding ever since. Yet there is no centre to the expansion; it is the same everywhere. The Big Bang should not be visualized as an ordinary explosion. The universe is not expanding out from a centre into space; rather, the whole universe is expanding and it is doing so equally at all places, as far as we can tell.http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/.....entre.html

,,, and since any 3-Dimensional point can be considered central in the 4-Dimensional space time of General Relativity, then it is now left completely open to whomever is making a model of the universe to decide for themselves what is to be considered central in the universe,,,

How Einstein Revealed the Universe’s Strange “Nonlocality” – George Musser | Oct 20, 2015
Excerpt: Under most circumstances, we can ignore this nonlocality. You can designate some available chunk of matter as a reference point and use it to anchor a coordinate grid. You can, to the chagrin of Santa Barbarans, take Los Angeles as the center of the universe and define every other place with respect to it. In this framework, you can go about your business in blissful ignorance of space’s fundamental inability to demarcate locations.,,
In short, Einstein’s theory is nonlocal in a more subtle and insidious way than Newton’s theory of gravity was. Newtonian gravity acted at a distance, but at least it operated within a framework of absolute space. Einsteinian gravity has no such element of wizardry; its effects ripple through the universe at the speed of light. Yet it demolishes the framework, violating locality in what was, for Einstein, its most basic sense: the stipulation that all things have a location. General relativity confounds our intuitive picture of space as a kind of container in which material objects reside and forces us to search for an entirely new conception of place.http://www.scientificamerican......nlocality/

Einstein himself stated, The two sentences: “the sun is at rest and the earth moves” or “the sun moves and the earth is at rest” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS [coordinate systems].”

“Can we formulate physical laws so that they are valid for all CS [coordinate systems], not only those moving uniformly, but also those moving quite arbitrarily, relative to each other? […] The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS could be used with equal justification. The two sentences: “the sun is at rest and the earth moves” or “the sun moves and the earth is at rest” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS.”
Einstein, A. and Infeld, L. (1938) The Evolution of Physics, p.212 (p.248 in original 1938 ed.);

Fred Hoyle and George Ellis add their considerable weight here in these following two quotes:

“The relation of the two pictures [geocentrism and geokineticism] is reduced to a mere coordinate transformation and it is the main tenet of the Einstein theory that any two ways of looking at the world which are related to each other by a coordinate transformation are entirely equivalent from a physical point of view…. Today we cannot say that the Copernican theory is ‘right’ and the Ptolemaic theory ‘wrong’ in any meaningful physical sense.”
Hoyle, Fred. Nicolaus Copernicus. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1973.

“People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations… For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations… You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds… What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.”
– George Ellis – W. Wayt Gibbs, “Profile: George F. R. Ellis,” Scientific American, October 1995, Vol. 273, No.4, p. 55

As Einstein himself noted, there simply is no test that can be performed that can prove the earth is not the center of the universe:

“One need not view the existence of such centrifugal forces as originating from the motion of K’ [the Earth]; one could just as well account for them as resulting from the average rotational effect of distant, detectable masses as evidenced in the vicinity of K’ [the Earth], whereby K’ [the Earth] is treated as being at rest.”
–Albert Einstein, quoted in Hans Thirring, “On the Effect of Distant Rotating Masses in Einstein’s Theory of Gravitation”, Physikalische Zeitschrift 22, 29, 1921

“If one rotates the shell *relative to the fixed stars* about an axis going through its center, a Coriolis force arises in the interior of the shell, *that is, the plane of a Foucault pendulum is dragged around*”
–Albert Einstein, cited in “Gravitation”, Misner Thorne and Wheeler pp. 544-545.

Here are a few more references that drives this point home:

“We can’t feel our motion through space, nor has any physical experiment ever proved that the Earth actually is in motion.,,,
If all the objects in space were removed save one, then no one could say whether that one remaining object was at rest or hurtling through the void at 100,000 miles per second”
Historian Lincoln Barnett – “The Universe and Dr. Einstein” – pg 73 (contains a foreword by Albert Einstein)

Could 80-year-old ether experiments have detected a cosmological temperature gradient? – February 8, 2016
Excerpt: the 20 or so experiments performed since 1887 seem to have steadily improved the precision in support of the view that there is no ether and no preferred reference frame.http://phys.org/news/2016-02-y.....dient.html

“In the Ptolemaic system, the earth is considered to be at rest and without rotation in the center of the universe, while the sun, other planets and fixed stars rotate around the earth. In relational mechanics this rotation of distant matter yields the force such that the equation of motion takes the form of equation (8.47). Now the gravitational attraction of the sun is balanced by a real gravitational centrifugal force due to the annual rotation of distant masses around the earth (with a component having a period of one year). In this way the earth can remain at rest and at an essentially constant distance from the sun. The diurnal rotation of distant masses around the earth (with a period of one day) yields a real gravitational centrifugal force flattening the earth at the poles. Foucault’s pendulum is explained by a real Coriolis force acting on moving masses over the earth’s surface in the form –2mgvme ´ ?Ue, where vme is the velocity of the test body relative to the earth and ?Ue is the angular rotation of the distant masses around the earth. The effect of this force will be to keep the plane of oscillation of the pendulum rotating together with the fixed stars.”
(Andre K. T. Assis, Relational Mechanics, pp. 190-191).

“…Thus we may return to Ptolemy’s point of view of a ‘motionless earth’… One has to show that the transformed metric can be regarded as produced according to Einstein’s field equations, by distant rotating masses. This has been done by Thirring. He calculated a field due to a rotating, hollow, thick-walled sphere and proved that inside the cavity it behaved as though there were centrifugal and other inertial forces usually attributed to absolute space. Thus from Einstein’s point of view, Ptolemy and Copernicus are equally right.”
Born, Max. “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity”, Dover Publications,1962, pgs 344 & 345:

Even Stephen Hawking himself, who once claimed that we are just chemical scum on an insignificant planet, stated that it is not true that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong,,, the real advantage of the Copernican system is simply that the equations of motion are much simpler in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest.”

“So which is real, the Ptolemaic or Copernican system? Although it is not uncommon for people to say that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true. As in the case of our normal view versus that of the goldfish, one can use either picture as a model of the universe, for our observations of the heavens can be explained by assuming either the earth or the sun to be at rest.
Despite its role in philosophical debates over the nature of our universe, the real advantage of the Copernican system is simply that the equations of motion are much simpler in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest.”
Stephen Hawking – The Grand Design – page 39 – 2010

Even individual people can be considered to be central in the universe according to the four-dimensional space-time of General Relativity,,,

You Technically Are the Center of the Universe – May 2016
Excerpt: (due to the 1 in 10^120 finely tuned expansion of the 4-D space-time of General Relativity) no matter where you stand, it will appear that everything in the universe is expanding around you. So the center of the universe is technically — everywhere.
The moment you pick a frame of reference, that point becomes the center of the universe.
Here’s another way to think about it: The sphere of space we can see around us is the visible universe. We’re looking at the light from stars that’s traveled millions or billions of years to reach us. When we reach the 13.8 billion-light-year point, we’re seeing the universe just moments after the Big Bang happened.
But someone standing on another planet, a few light-years to the right, would see a different sphere of the universe. It’s sort of like lighting a match in the middle of a dark room: Your observable universe is the sphere of the room that the light illuminates.
But someone standing in a different spot in the room will be able to see a different sphere. So technically, we are all standing at the center of our own observable universes.https://mic.com/articles/144214/you-technically-are-the-center-of-the-universe-thanks-to-a-wacky-physics-quirk

,,, In fact, when Einstein’s first formulated both Special and General relativity, he gave a hypothetical observer a privileged frame of reference in which to make measurements in the universe.

Introduction to special relativity
Excerpt: Einstein’s approach was based on thought experiments, calculations, and the principle of relativity, which is the notion that all physical laws should appear the same (that is, take the same basic form) to all inertial observers.,,,
Each observer has a distinct “frame of reference” in which velocities are measured,,,,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.....relativity

The happiest thought of my life.
Excerpt: In 1920 Einstein commented that a thought came into his mind when writing the above-mentioned paper he called it “the happiest thought of my life”:
“The gravitational field has only a relative existence… Because for an observer freely falling from the roof of a house – at least in his immediate surroundings – there exists no gravitational field.”http://physics.ucr.edu/~wudka/.....ode85.html

Whereas, on the other hand, in Quantum Mechanics it is the measurement itself that gives each observer a privileged frame of reference in the universe.

Experiment confirms quantum theory weirdness – May 27, 2015
Excerpt: Common sense says the object is either wave-like or particle-like, independent of how we measure it. But quantum physics predicts that whether you observe wave like behavior (interference) or particle behavior (no interference) depends only on how it is actually measured at the end of its journey. This is exactly what the ANU team found.
“It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” said Associate Professor Andrew Truscott from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering.http://phys.org/news/2015-05-q.....dness.html

Richard Conn Henry who is Professor of Physics at John Hopkins University states “It is more than 80 years since the discovery of quantum mechanics gave us the most fundamental insight ever into our nature: the overturning of the Copernican Revolution, and the restoration of us human beings to centrality in the Universe.”

“It is more than 80 years since the discovery of quantum mechanics gave us the most fundamental insight ever into our nature: the overturning of the Copernican Revolution, and the restoration of us human beings to centrality in the Universe.
And yet, have you ever before read a sentence having meaning similar to that of my preceding sentence? Likely you have not, and the reason you have not is, in my opinion, that physicists are in a state of denial, and have fears and agonies that are very similar to the fears and agonies that Copernicus and Galileo went through with their perturbations of society.”
Richard Conn Henry – Professor of Physics – John Hopkins Universityhttp://henry.pha.jhu.edu/quantum.enigma.html

Moreover, there are Anomalies in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation that strangely line up with the solar system and earth.

Why is the solar system cosmically aligned? BY Dragan Huterer – 2007
The solar system seems to line up with the largest cosmic features. Is this mere coincidence or a signpost to deeper insights?
Caption under figure on page 43:
ODD ALIGNMENTS hide within the multipoles of the cosmic microwave background. In this combination of the quadrupole and octopole, a plane bisects the sphere between the largest warm and cool lobes. The ecliptic — the plane of Earth’s orbit projected onto the celestial sphere — is aligned parallel to the plane between the lobes.http://www-personal.umich.edu/.....uterer.pdf

These ‘anomalies’ in the CMBR indicating a earth centered universe have now been ‘re-confirmed’ with more accurate measurements from the Planck satellite:

In further establishing our centrality in this vast universe, in the following video, physicist Neil Turok states that we live in the middle, or at the geometric mean, between the largest scale in physics and the smallest scale in physics:

“So we can go from 10 to the plus 25 to 10 to the minus 35. Now where are we? Well the size of a living cell is about 10 to the minus 5. Which is halfway between the two. In mathematical terms, we say it is the geometric mean. We live in the middle between the largest scale in physics,,, and the tiniest scale [in physics].”
– Neil Turok as quoted at the 14:40 minute mark
The Astonishing Simplicity of Everything – Neil Turok Public Lecture – video (12:00 minute mark, we live in the geometric mean, i.e. the middle, of the universe)https://youtu.be/f1x9lgX8GaE?t=715

As you can see, the preceding interactive graph pegs the geometric mean at 10^-4 meters , which just so happens to correspond to the limits to human vision as well as the size of the human egg.

All of this is very interesting for, as far as I can tell, the limits to human vision as well as the size of the human egg could have, theoretically, been at very different positions than directly at the geometric mean.

It is also very interesting since it more or less directly challenges the supposed ‘Copernican Principle and/or the Principle of Mediocrity’ which holds life, and humans in particular have no special significance within this universe.

In conclusion, the earth, and more specifically, humans upon the earth are not nearly as insignificant as is believed by the vast majority of supposedly “scientifically educated” people today.

Colossians 1:15-20
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

While the evidence provided by quantum mechanics may not be a knockout argument against materialism, it is definitely not an argument for it. It is the materialist who is forced to rationalize and equivocate. Looking at it dispassionately and objectively that is not a strong position

Scientists are closing loopholes in delayed choice experiment so materialism cannot be position based on science. It appears that materialism is more of a ideologically driven position rather than scientific/logical/rational

re 20: that is an interesting article. However, and this is the topic that started the “wjm throws down the gauntlet” thread, I don’t think the issue discussed in the article is materialism (in the modern sense), either pro or con, but rather trying to refine our understanding of the nature of quantum particles, which are the foundation of the material world.

Note also that towards the end the article mentions some alternative explanations for what is going on, which is what good science writing should do.

My favorite young physicist is Nima Arkani Hamed. He’s working on theory that’s supposed to be more fundamental than quantum mechanics. It’s pretty abstract so it takes a while to get it but if you have 1 hour 31 minutes there’s a great recent lecture on YouTube

Thanks. Unfortunately I don’t take the time to watch videos: I prefer reading. Unfortunately, I can’t find any text by him. I did find five lectures from 2020 that looked interesting: http://www.cornell.edu/video/p.....al-physics

At 20 Eugen mentioned a ‘new’ loop-hole in quantum mechanics that was recently closed:

Closed Loophole Confirms the Unreality of the Quantum World – July 25, 2018
After researchers found a loophole in a famous experiment designed to prove that quantum objects don’t have intrinsic properties, three experimental groups quickly sewed the loophole shut. The episode closes the door on many “hidden variable” theories.
Excerpt: Chaves’s team then proposed a twist to Wheeler’s experiment to test the loophole. With unusual alacrity, three teams raced to do the modified experiment. Their results, reported in early June, have shown that a class of classical models that advocate realism cannot make sense of the results. Quantum mechanics may be weird, but it’s still, oddly, the simplest explanation around.,,,https://www.quantamagazine.org/closed-loophole-confirms-the-unreality-of-the-quantum-world-20180725/

This adds to the growing list of ‘loop-holes’, (ad hoc ‘loop-holes’ that would have saved a classical, materialistic, and/or deterministic view of the world), that have now been closed,,,

Bell-inequality violation with entangled photons, free of the coincidence-time loophole – Sept. 2014
Abstract
In a local realist model, physical properties are defined prior to and independent of measurement and no physical influence can propagate faster than the speed of light. Proper experimental violation of a Bell inequality would show that the world cannot be described with such a model. Experiments intended to demonstrate a violation usually require additional assumptions that make them vulnerable to a number of “loopholes.” In both pulsed and continuously pumped photonic experiments, an experimenter needs to identify which detected photons belong to the same pair, giving rise to the coincidence-time loophole. Here, via two different methods, we derive Clauser-Horne- and Eberhard-type inequalities that are not only free of the fair-sampling assumption (thus not being vulnerable to the detection loophole), but also free of the fair-coincidence assumption (thus not being vulnerable to the coincidence-time loophole). Both approaches can be used for pulsed as well as for continuously pumped experiments. Moreover, as they can also be applied to already existing experimental data, we finally show that a recent experiment [Giustina et al., Nature (London) 497, 227 (2013)] violated local realism without requiring the fair-coincidence assumption.http://journals.aps.org/pra/ab......90.032107

Closing the last Bell-test loophole for photons – Jun 11, 2013
Excerpt: In the years since, many “Bell tests” have been performed, but critics have identified several conditions (known as loopholes) in which the results could be considered inconclusive. For entangled photons, there have been three major loopholes; two were closed by previous experiments. The remaining problem, known as the “detection-efficiency/fair sampling loophole,” results from the fact that, until now, the detectors employed in experiments have captured an insufficiently large fraction of the photons, and the photon sources have been insufficiently efficient. The validity of such experiments is thus dependent on the assumption that the detected photons are a statistically fair sample of all the photons. That, in turn, leaves open the possibility that, if all the photon data were known, they could be described by local realism.
The new research, conducted at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Communication in Austria, closes the fair-sampling loophole by using improved photon sources (spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a Sagnac configuration) and ultra-sensitive detectors provided by the Single Photonics and Quantum Information project in PML’s Quantum Electronics and Photonics Division. That combination, the researchers write, was “crucial for achieving a sufficiently high collection efficiency,” resulting in a high-accuracy data set – requiring no assumptions or correction of count rates – that confirmed quantum entanglement to nearly 70 standard deviations.,,,http://phys.org/news/2013-06-b.....otons.html

Closing the ‘free will’ loophole: Using distant quasars to test Bell’s theorem – February 20, 2014
Excerpt: Though two major loopholes have since been closed, a third remains; physicists refer to it as “setting independence,” or more provocatively, “free will.” This loophole proposes that a particle detector’s settings may “conspire” with events in the shared causal past of the detectors themselves to determine which properties of the particle to measure — a scenario that, however far-fetched, implies that a physicist running the experiment does not have complete free will in choosing each detector’s setting. Such a scenario would result in biased measurements, suggesting that two particles are correlated more than they actually are, and giving more weight to quantum mechanics than classical physics.
“It sounds creepy, but people realized that’s a logical possibility that hasn’t been closed yet,” says MIT’s David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and senior lecturer in the Department of Physics. “Before we make the leap to say the equations of quantum theory tell us the world is inescapably crazy and bizarre, have we closed every conceivable logical loophole, even if they may not seem plausible in the world we know today?”http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....112515.htm

Prof. Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology lecture:
Entangled Photons – from Bell Tests (closing all loopholes, including freedom of choice, at 16:40 minute mark) to Applications – Published on Jul 25, 2016https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzMdKCcCGDI

I would like to focus in on the supposed ‘free will’ loop-hole.

Although many people seem to believe there are several ‘interpretations’ possible for quantum mechanics, in his article entitled ‘The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics’, Steven Weinberg, who is an atheist himself, states that there are, in reality, only two possible interpretations of quantum mechanics.

The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics – Steven Weinberg – JANUARY 19, 2017
Excerpt: Today there are two widely followed approaches to quantum mechanics, the “realist” and “instrumentalist” approaches, which view the origin of probability in measurement in two very different ways. For reasons I will explain, neither approach seems to me quite satisfactory.https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/trouble-with-quantum-mechanics/

Weinberg rightly rejects the ‘realist’ approach since it leads to the insanity called the ‘many worlds’ interpretation and since the ‘realist’ approach really does not deal with the probabilities properly without invoking ad hoc assumptions and since quantum entanglement itself also contradicts the ‘realist’ approach.

“In the realist approach the history of the world is endlessly splitting; it does so every time a macroscopic body becomes tied in with a choice of quantum states. This inconceivably huge variety of histories has provided material for science fiction,12 and it offers a rationale for a multiverse, in which the particular cosmic history in which we find ourselves is constrained by the requirement that it must be one of the histories in which conditions are sufficiently benign to allow conscious beings to exist. But the vista of all these parallel histories is deeply unsettling,,,
There is another thing that is unsatisfactory about the realist approach, beyond our parochial preferences. In this approach the wave function of the multiverse evolves deterministically. We can still talk of probabilities as the fractions of the time that various possible results are found when measurements are performed many times in any one history; but the rules that govern what probabilities are observed would have to follow from the deterministic evolution of the whole multiverse. If this were not the case, to predict probabilities we would need to make some additional assumption about what happens when humans make measurements, and we would be back with the shortcomings of the instrumentalist approach.,,
The realist approach to quantum mechanics had already run into a different sort of trouble long before Everett wrote about multiple histories. It was emphasized in a 1935 paper by Einstein with his coworkers Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, and arises in connection with the phenomenon of “entanglement.””
– Weinberg

And although it is easy to see why Weinberg rejected the deterministic ‘realist’ approach, it is interesting to see why he rejects the ‘instrumentalist’ approach.

The reason why Weinberg rejects the instrumentalist approach is because, “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level.,,, the instrumentalist approach (in quantum mechanics) turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.,,, In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure,,, Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,,”

The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics – Steven Weinberg – January 19, 2017
Excerpt: The instrumentalist approach,, (the) wave function,, is merely an instrument that provides predictions of the probabilities of various outcomes when measurements are made.,,
In the instrumentalist approach,,, humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level. According to Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”11
Thus the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else. It is not that we object to thinking about humans. Rather, we want to understand the relation of humans to nature, not just assuming the character of this relation by incorporating it in what we suppose are nature’s fundamental laws, but rather by deduction from laws that make no explicit reference to humans. We may in the end have to give up this goal,,,
Some physicists who adopt an instrumentalist approach argue that the probabilities we infer from the wave function are objective probabilities, independent of whether humans are making a measurement. I don’t find this tenable. In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure, such as the spin in one or another direction. Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,,http://www.nybooks.com/article.....mechanics/

Basically Weinberg rejects the instrumentalist approach because of free will. It is just plain bizarre that someone would think it ‘reasonable’ to reject the instrumentalist approach of quantum mechanics because of free will.

To reject free will is to undermine any ability we might have had to reason rationally in the first place.

As Martin Cothan states in the following article “The claim that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent that must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order.”

Sam Harris’s Free Will: The Medial Pre-Frontal Cortex Did It – Martin Cothran – November 9, 2012
Excerpt: There is something ironic about the position of thinkers like Harris on issues like this: they claim that their position is the result of the irresistible necessity of logic (in fact, they pride themselves on their logic). Their belief is the consequent, in a ground/consequent relation between their evidence and their conclusion. But their very stated position is that any mental state — including their position on this issue — is the effect of a physical, not logical cause.
By their own logic, it isn’t logic that demands their assent to the claim that free will is an illusion, but the prior chemical state of their brains. The only condition under which we could possibly find their argument convincing is if they are not true. The claim that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent that must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order.http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....66221.html

And as Michael Egnor also recently pointed out, the denial of free will is self-refuting:

Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield on Free Will – Michael Egnor – July 26, 2018
Excerpt: For a philosophical example, consider that affirmation or denial of free will is a proposition, which is a statement that may or may not be true. But matter has no truth value — propositions aren’t material things. Matter just is; it is neither true nor false. Thus, when a materialist claims that material causes preclude the possibility of free will, he is also claiming that his own opinion cannot be true (or false). Denial of free will on the basis of materialistic determinism is self-refuting. …https://evolutionnews.org/2018/07/neurosurgeon-wilder-penfield-on-free-will/

Micheal Egnor also highlights the fact that neurological research supports the reality of free will.

Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield on Free Will – Michael Egnor – July 26, 2018
Excerpt: No Counterfeit Will
Penfield marveled that he could stimulate all manner of movement and sensation and memory, but he could never evoke agency. He couldn’t stimulate the sense of will — he couldn’t produce a counterfeit will in the conscious patient by stimulation of the brain.
Penfield concluded that this meant that the will (he called it the “mind”) was not in the brain, or at least not in any part of the brain that he could stimulate, and that the will was not a physical thing. The will was free, in the sense that it could not be evoked by material means.
Penfield began his career as a strident materialist. He ended it as a passionate dualist — the title “Mystery of the Mind” was largely the expression of his amazement that there was a scientifically demonstrable duality to the mind.,,,
The denial of free will is an ideological bias, not a credible scientific or philosophical conclusion.https://evolutionnews.org/2018/07/neurosurgeon-wilder-penfield-on-free-will/

Science and the Soul – Michael Egnor – June 2018
Excerpt:,,, Some of the most fascinating research on consciousness was done by Penfield’s contemporary Benjamin Libet at the University of California, San Francisco.,,,
Libet began by choosing a very simple thought: the decision to press a button. He modified an oscilloscope so that a dot circled the screen once each second, and when the subject decided to push the button, he or she noted the location of the dot at the time of the decision. Libet measured the timing of the decision and the timing of the brain waves of many volunteers with accuracy in the tens of milliseconds. Consistently he found that the conscious decision to push the button was preceded by about half a second by a brain wave, which he called the readiness potential. Then a half-second later the subject became aware of his decision. It appeared at first that the subjects were not free; their brains made the decision to move and they followed it.
But Libet looked deeper. He asked his subjects to veto their decision immediately after they made it – to not push the button. Again, the readiness potential appeared a half-second before conscious awareness of the decision to push the button, but Libet found that the veto – he called it “free won’t” – had no brain wave corresponding to it.
The brain, then, has activity that corresponds to a pre-conscious urge to do something. But we are free to veto or accept this urge. The motives are material. The veto, and implicitly the acceptance, is an immaterial act of the will.
Libet noted the correspondence between his experiments and the traditional religious understanding of human beings. We are, he said, beset by a sea of inclinations, corresponding to material activity in our brains, which we have the free choice to reject or accept. It is hard not to read this in more familiar terms: we are tempted by sin, yet we are free to choose.https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/reconciliation/science-and-the-soul

As Dr. Egnor stated in the first article, “The denial of free will is an ideological bias, not a credible scientific or philosophical conclusion.”

Moreover, besides neurological research supporting the reality of free will, in quantum mechanics we find that the reality of free will is now supported by what is termed ‘contextuality and/or the Kochen-Speckter Theorem

With contextuality we find that, “In the quantum world, the property that you discover through measurement is not the property that the system actually had prior to the measurement process. What you observe necessarily depends on how you carried out the observation” and “Measurement outcomes depend on all the other measurements that are performed – the full context of the experiment.”

Contextuality is ‘magic ingredient’ for quantum computing – June 11, 2012
Excerpt: Contextuality was first recognized as a feature of quantum theory almost 50 years ago. The theory showed that it was impossible to explain measurements on quantum systems in the same way as classical systems.
In the classical world, measurements simply reveal properties that the system had, such as colour, prior to the measurement. In the quantum world, the property that you discover through measurement is not the property that the system actually had prior to the measurement process. What you observe necessarily depends on how you carried out the observation.
Imagine turning over a playing card. It will be either a red suit or a black suit – a two-outcome measurement. Now imagine nine playing cards laid out in a grid with three rows and three columns. Quantum mechanics predicts something that seems contradictory – there must be an even number of red cards in every row and an odd number of red cards in every column. Try to draw a grid that obeys these rules and you will find it impossible. It’s because quantum measurements cannot be interpreted as merely revealing a pre-existing property in the same way that flipping a card reveals a red or black suit.
Measurement outcomes depend on all the other measurements that are performed – the full context of the experiment.
Contextuality means that quantum measurements can not be thought of as simply revealing some pre-existing properties of the system under study. That’s part of the weirdness of quantum mechanics.http://phys.org/news/2014-06-w.....antum.html

And as leading experimental physicist Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”

“The Kochen-Speckter Theorem talks about properties of one system only. So we know that we cannot assume – to put it precisely, we know that it is wrong to assume that the features of a system, which we observe in a measurement exist prior to measurement. Not always. I mean in a certain cases. So in a sense, what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
Anton Zeilinger –
Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism – video (7:17 minute mark)https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4C5pq7W5yRM#t=437

And to reiterate, the ‘free will’ loop-hole in quantum mechanics has now been all but effectively closed with the only remaining options limited to ‘truly bizarre’ scenarios in which our choices were somehow ‘superdetermined’ humdreds (even billions) of years ago:

Experiment Reaffirms Quantum Weirdness – 2017
Excerpt: In the first of a planned series of “cosmic Bell test” experiments, the team sent pairs of photons from the roof of Zeilinger’s lab in Vienna through the open windows of two other buildings and into optical modulators, tallying coincident detections as usual. But this time, they attempted to lower the chance that the modulator settings might somehow become correlated with the states of the photons in the moments before each measurement. They pointed a telescope out of each window, trained each telescope on a bright and conveniently located (but otherwise random) star, and, before each measurement, used the color of an incoming photon from each star to set the angle of the associated modulator. The colors of these photons were decided hundreds of years ago, when they left their stars, increasing the chance that they (and therefore the measurement settings) were independent of the states of the photons being measured.
And yet, the scientists found that the measurement outcomes still violated Bell’s upper limit, boosting their confidence that the polarized photons in the experiment exhibit spooky action at a distance after all.
Nature could still exploit the freedom-of-choice loophole, but the universe would have had to delete items from the menu of possible measurement settings at least 600 years before the measurements occurred (when the closer of the two stars sent its light toward Earth). “Now one needs the correlations to have been established even before Shakespeare wrote, ‘Until I know this sure uncertainty, I’ll entertain the offered fallacy,’” Hall said.
Next, the team plans to use light from increasingly distant quasars to control their measurement settings, probing further back in time and giving the universe an even smaller window to cook up correlations between future device settings and restrict freedoms.https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170207-bell-test-quantum-loophole/

But why is the quantum world thought spooky anyway? – September 1, 2015
Excerpt: Leifer is less troubled by this ‘freedom-of-choice loophole’, however. “It could be that there is some kind of superdeterminism, so that the choice of measurement settings was determined at the Big Bang,” he says. “We can never prove that is not the case, so I think it’s fair to say that most physicists don’t worry too much about this.”http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ky-anyway/

One concluding thought, although free will is often thought of as allowing someone to choose between a veritable infinity of options, in a theistic view of reality that veritable infinity of options all boils down to just two options. Eternal life, (infinity if you will), with God, or Eternal life, (infinity again if you will), without God. C.S. states it as such:

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.”
– C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

And exactly as would be expected on the Christian view of reality, we find two very different eternities in reality. An ‘infinitely destructive’ eternity associated with General Relativity and a extremely orderly eternity associated with Special Relativity:

This adds to the growing list of ‘loop-holes’, (ad hoc ‘loop-holes’ that would have saved a classical, materialistic, and/or deterministic view of the world), that have now been closed,,,

1. The classical view of the world (Newtonian, clockwork, Cartesian space within which time flows steadily) has been off the table for a century.

2. A deterministic quantum perspective that posits hidden variables out of which the probability and wave collapse that we see is not supported by the experiment Eugen posted about.

3. However, nothing about that experiment addresses materialism in the modern sense, one way or another. Quantum phenomena are the foundation, as far as we know, of the material world, so learning how they work is a materialistic enterprise.

The issue, which we have been discussing here, is the role of the conscious observer, and that issue is unsettled, as has been discussed on the “gauntlet” thread.

“3. However, nothing about that experiment addresses materialism in the modern sense, one way or another. Quantum phenomena are the foundation, as far as we know, of the material world, so learning how they work is a materialistic enterprise.”

Besides the fallacy of assuming your conclusion into your premise, i.e. “begging the question”, there is nothing ‘materialistic’ in man’s ability to practice science.

From our technology, to the ‘intelligent design’ of the scientific instruments themselves, (test tubes, telescopes and computers certainly do not ‘naturally’ appear out of thin air), to the design and analysis of scientific experiments with ‘immaterial mathematics’, even computers themselves, the entire enterprise of science is thoroughly ‘non-materialistic’ in its endeavor.

What Does It Mean to Say That Science & Religion Conflict? – M. Anthony Mills – April 16, 2018
Excerpt: In fact, more problematic for the materialist than the non-existence of persons is the existence of mathematics. Why? Although a committed materialist might be perfectly willing to accept that you do not really exist, he will have a harder time accepting that numbers do not exist. The trouble is that numbers — along with other mathematical entities such as classes, sets, and functions — are indispensable for modern science. And yet — here’s the rub — these “abstract objects” are not material. Thus, one cannot take science as the only sure guide to reality and at the same time discount disbelief in all immaterial realities.https://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2018/04/16/what_does_it_mean_to_say_that_science_and_religion_conflict.html

Recognising Top-Down Causation – George Ellis
Excerpt: page 5: A: Causal Efficacy of Non Physical entities:
Both the program and the data are non-physical entities, indeed so is all software. A program is not a physical thing you can point to, but by Definition 2 it certainly exists. You can point to a CD or flashdrive where it is stored, but that is not the thing in itself: it is a medium in which it is stored.
The program itself is an abstract entity, shaped by abstract logic. Is the software “nothing but” its realisation through a specific set of stored electronic states in the computer memory banks? No it is not because it is the precise pattern in those states that matters: a higher level relation that is not apparent at the scale of the electrons themselves. It’s a relational thing (and if you get the relations between the symbols wrong, so you have a syntax error, it will all come to a grinding halt). This abstract nature of software is realised in the concept of virtual machines, which occur at every level in the computer hierarchy except the bottom one [17]. But this tower of virtual machines causes physical effects in the real world, for example when a computer controls a robot in an assembly line to create physical artefacts.
Excerpt page 7: The assumption that causation is bottom up only is wrong in biology, in computers, and even in many cases in physics, ,,,
The mind is not a physical entity, but it certainly is causally effective: proof is the existence of the computer on which you are reading this text. It could not exist if it had not been designed and manufactured according to someone’s plans, thereby proving the causal efficacy of thoughts, which like computer programs and data are not physical entities.http://fqxi.org/data/essay-con.....s_2012.pdf

Describing Nature With Math By Peter Tyson – Nov. 2011
Excerpt: Mathematics underlies virtually all of our technology today. James Maxwell’s four equations summarizing electromagnetism led directly to radio and all other forms of telecommunication. E = mc2 led directly to nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The equations of quantum mechanics made possible everything from transistors and semiconductors to electron microscopy and magnetic resonance imaging.
Indeed, many of the technologies you and I enjoy every day simply would not work without mathematics. When you do a Google search, you’re relying on 19th-century algebra, on which the search engine’s algorithms are based. When you watch a movie, you may well be seeing mountains and other natural features that, while appearing as real as rock, arise entirely from mathematical models. When you play your iPod, you’re hearing a mathematical recreation of music that is stored digitally; your cell phone does the same in real time.
“When you listen to a mobile phone, you’re not actually hearing the voice of the person speaking,” Devlin told me. “You’re hearing a mathematical recreation of that voice. That voice is reduced to mathematics.”http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/p.....-math.html

In fact, the imposition of what is termed ‘methodological naturalism’ onto science, far from being a supposed required prerequisite of science, as atheists falsely claim that it is, actually leads to the catastrophic epistemological failure of science itself.

Although the Darwinist/Atheist firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science, the fact of the matter is that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to:

Darwin’s Theory vs Falsification – 39:45 minute markhttps://youtu.be/8rzw0JkuKuQ?t=2387
Excerpt: Basically, because of reductive materialism (and/or methodological naturalism), the atheistic materialist is forced to claim that he is merely a ‘neuronal illusion’ (Coyne, Dennett, etc..), who has the illusion of free will (Harris), who has unreliable beliefs about reality (Plantinga), who has illusory perceptions of reality (Hoffman), who, since he has no real time empirical evidence substantiating his grandiose claims, must make up illusory “just so stories” with the illusory, and impotent, ‘designer substitute’ of natural selection (Behe, Gould, Sternberg), so as to ‘explain away’ the appearance (i.e. illusion) of design (Crick, Dawkins), and who must make up illusory meanings and purposes for his life since the reality of the nihilism inherent in his atheistic worldview is too much for him to bear (Weikart), and who must also hold morality to be subjective and illusory since he has rejected God (Craig, Kreeft).
Bottom line, nothing is real in the atheist’s worldview, least of all, morality, meaning and purposes for life.,,,
Paper with references for each claim page; Page 37:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pAYmZpUWFEi3hu45FbQZEvGKsZ9GULzh8KM0CpqdePk/edit

Thus, although the Darwinian Atheist firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to.

It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.

2 Corinthians 10:5
Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

Matthew 7:24-27
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

Besides the fallacy of assuming your conclusion into your premise, i.e. “begging the question”, there is nothing ‘materialistic’ in man’s ability to practice science.

From our technology, to the ‘intelligent design’ of the scientific instruments themselves, (test tubes, telescopes and computers certainly do not ‘naturally’ appear out of thin air), to the design and analysis of scientific experiments with ‘immaterial mathematics’, even computers themselves, the entire enterprise of science is thoroughly ‘non-materialistic’ in its endeavor.

LOL, indeed. According to this argument, studying rocks disproves materialism, because it assumes (begging the question) that human investigation of the world is the product of something immaterial, which is exactly the point upon which materialists disagree.

And, ba, in his hodge-podge of quotes, has strayed from what I think is the point of the thread, which is whether it is settled matter that conscious experience is essential for the manifestation of reality, whatever that might mean, at the quantum level.

I’ll return to the question that John Bell raised, which I quoted in the “gauntlet” thread”

Excerpt From: Adam Becker. “What Is Real?.” iBooks.

“If wave functions are information rather than objects in themselves, they must be information of a rather peculiar sort. “Whose information?” demanded John Bell.
“Information about what?”

To resolve the measurement problem, information-theoretic interpretations had to answer these questions. The most immediate and Copenhagen-friendly answers were “my information” and “information about my observations”—but to Bell, such answers were profoundly inadequate.

Placing observation at the center of physics smacked of positivism, a philosophy that Bell had entertained and rejected during his college days, concluding that it led inevitably to solipsism. Solipsism—the idea that you are the only person, and everyone and everything else is merely a hallucination of some kind in your own mind—was a problem that had haunted positivism from the start. Information-based interpretations of quantum physics ran the risk of collapsing into solipsism as well. If the information that the wave function represented was your information, what makes you so special? And how could different observers agree on the same information? How could your information appear to be an objective fact in the world, something capable of creating interference patterns plain for all to see?

Those are questions that the “mind before matter” crowd need to address.

@jdk Since you like reading, this is the book description of Ashish Dalela’s Quantum Meaning — A Semantic Interpretation of Quantum Theory, using insights from Indian philosophy and every day life to speak about the quantum issue. The main idea is that quantum theory has stumbled across the nature of reality as meaning/information/ideas but this goes so much against Newtonian physics and classical thinking, which is still embedded in the minds of many scientists, that it is simply impossible to accept at this time. This is the full book description from Amazon, if you’re interested:

“The problems of indeterminism, uncertainty and statistics in quantum theory are legend and have spawned a wide-variety of interpretations, none too satisfactory.The key issue of discontent is the conflict between the microscopic and the macroscopic worlds: How does a classically certain world emerge from a world of uncertainty and probability? To attempt to solve this riddle, we must first understand the nature of atoms.

What If Atoms Are Not Things But Ideas?

In the Semantic Interpretation of Quantum Theory atomic objects are treated as symbols of meaning. The book shows that if atoms are symbols, then describing them as meaningless objects would naturally lead to problems of uncertainty, indeterminism, non-locality and probability.

For example, if we analyze a book in terms of physical properties, we can measure the frequencies of symbols but not their meanings. Current quantum theory measures symbol probabilities rather than meanings associated with symbol order. Unless quantum objects are treated as symbols, the succession or order amongst these objects will remain unpredictable.

Is Quantum Theory a Final Theory of Reality?

Quantum Meaning argues that the current quantum theory is not a final theory of reality. Rather, the theory can be replaced by a better one, in which objects are treated as symbols, rendering it free of indeterminism and probability. The Semantic Interpretation makes it possible to formulate new laws of nature. These laws will predict the order amongst symbols, similar to the notes in a musical composition or the words in a book.

How This Book Is Structured

Chapter 1: Quantum Information—discusses the quantum physics – classical physics conflict and connects it to the historical divide between primary and secondary properties. The consequences of introducing semantic information into physics are described.

Chapter 2: The Quantum Problem—surveys the “quantum weirdness” including issue such as discreteness, uncertainty, probability, wave-particle duality, non-locality and irreversibility.

Chapter 3: Developing the Intuitions—an informational view of nature is motivated by analyzing the problems that arise when symbols are treated as classical objects. The connection between problems of meaning and Godel’s Incompleteness and Turing’s Halting Problem are discussed and certain foundational notions such as semantic space and quantum spacelets are introduced.

Chapter 4: The Semantic Interpretation—interprets standard constructs in the quantum physics formalism such as statistics, uncertainty, Schrodinger’s equation, non-locality and complementarity. The chapter shows how these constructs cease to be problematic when quanta are treated as symbols.

Chapter 5: Advanced Quantum Topics—extends the ideas in the previous chapter to interpret quasi-particles, antiparticles, spin, the weak force, decoherence and the constant speed of light. The chapter discusses a semantic path to Quantum Gravity.

Chapter 6: Comparing Interpretations—compares the Semantic Interpretation with some well-known interpretations of quantum theory such as the Copenhagen Interpretation, the Ensemble Interpretation, the Many Worlds Interpretation, the Von Neumann/Wigner Interpretation, the Relational Interpretation, and the Objective Collapse Interpretation.

The book concludes by arguing that the quantum wavefunction—which is currently treated physically—can also be treated semantically. Much like a word can be understood as a sound vibration, but also has meaning, the quanta can also be treated as phonemes that symbolize meanings.”

Ross Rhodes has offered one very unconventional approach to the mysteries of quantum physics, described in his paper “A Cybernetic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”, at http://www.mysearch.org.uk/website1/pdf/615.1.pdf . He believes that the mysteries of quantum mechanics can best be explained as being an artifact of our reality being a virtual reality simulation being cybernetically, computationally, generated by a Being or Beings of incalculable power for the benefit (or otherwise) of us, the users or unwilling participants. Inherent to his ideas is the understanding of human consciousness as being fundamentally apart from and of a different nature than “physical” reality.

The table of contents below summarizes some of his ideas. It seems to me that it is at least strange that there should be so many “coincidental” correspondences.

I. The Appearance of Waves

A. Waves with no medium, as though they were mathematical formula only
B. Waves of calculation, not otherwise manifest, as though they really were differential equations
C. Standing waves, as though they were mathematical formula only

II. The Measurement Effect

A. “Collapse of the wave function” — consciousness as mediator, as though the sensory universe was a display to the user
B. Uncertainty and complementary properties, as though variables were being redefined and results calculated and recalculated according to an underlying formula

III. The Identical/Interchangeable Nature of “Particles” and Measured Properties – as though the “particles” were merely pictures of particles, like computer icons

IV. Continuity and Discontinuity in Observed Behaviors

A. “Quantum leaps,” as though there was no time or space between quantum events
B. The breakdown at zero, yielding infinities, as though the universe was being run by a computer clock on a coordinate grid

V. Non-locality – As though all calculations were in the CPU, regardless of the location of the pixels on the screen

VI. The Relationship of Observed Phenomena to the Mathematical Formalism – as though physical manifestations themselves were being produced by a mathematical formula

Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger by Richard Conn Henry – Physics Professor – John Hopkins University
Excerpt: Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the “illusion” of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism (solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist). (Dr. Henry’s referenced experiment and paper – “An experimental test of non-local realism” by S. Gröblacher et. al., Nature 446, 871, April 2007 – “To be or not to be local” by Alain Aspect, Nature 446, 866, April 2007 (Leggett’s Inequality: Violated, as of 2011, to 120 standard deviations)http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/aspect.html

This “Theistic immaterialism” is referred to as “occasionalist idealism” by Prof. Bruce Gordon

Divine Action and the World of Science: What Cosmology and Quantum Physics Teach Us about the Role of Providence in Nature – Bruce L. Gordon – 2017
Excerpt page 295: [T]he reality of a substance must include something intrinsic and qualitativeover and above any formal or structural features it may possess.117
When we consider the fact that the structure of reality in fundamental physical theory is merely phenomenological and that this structure itself is hollow and non-qualitative, whereas our experience is not, the metaphysical objectivity and epistemic intersubjectivity of the enstructured qualitative reality of our experience can be seen to be best explained by an occasionalist idealism of the sort advocated by George Berkeley (1685-1753) or Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). In the metaphysical context of this kind of theistic immaterialism, the vera causa that brings coherent closure to the phenomenological reality we inhabit is always and only agent causation. The necessity of causal sufficiency is met by divine action, for as Plantinga emphasizes:
[T]he connection between God’s willing that there be light and there being light is necessary in the broadly logical sense: it is necessary in that sense that if God wills that p, p occurs. Insofar as we have a grasp of necessity (and we do have a grasp of necessity), we also have a grasp of causality when it is divine causality that is at issue. I take it this is a point in favor of occasionalism, and in fact it constitutes a very powerful advantage of occasionalism. 118http://jbtsonline.org/wp-conte.....ressed.pdf

And after reviewing what is actually happening in the double slit, (as was mentioned in post 8), it is beyond me how anybody in their right mind, especially supposedly bright people in quantum physics, could possibly think that they themselves have the ‘Solipsitic’ capacity to collapse the infinite dimensional – infinite information wave function all by their lonesome selves.

Such a self-absorbed notion, ‘Solipsism’, that so blindly ignores the omniscient omnipresent Mind of God as the ‘sufficient cause’ necessary to collapse the infinite dimensional – infinite information wave function is nothing less than sheer absurdity!

The double slit, and the “infinity’ details inherent therein, is definitely very friendly to apriori Theistic, even specific Christian, presuppositions.

Solipsist Humor from Plantinga
,,,At a recent Lecture I attended by Philosopher Alvin Plantinga, he warmed up the crowd with a few solipsist jokes.,,,
FYI, solipsism is the rather odd idea that there is only one individual in the universe and that you are it. Everyone else is just a figment of your imagination.
1. British philosopher Bertrand Russell was a solipsist for a time (why does that not surprise me?), and he once received a letter from a woman who found his arguments very convincing. Well, I suppose it’s not so hard to convince a figment of your imagination that your arguments are brilliant. Anyway, the woman commented in her letter that his description of solipsism made a lot of sense and that, “I’m surprised there aren’t more of us.”
2. Plantinga also told of an accomplished academic who was a well-known solipsist (I forget the guys name). And Plantinga thought it would be fun to meet a real life solipsist, so he went to visit him. He was treated fairly well considering he was only figment. I mean, it’s not a given that a solipsist would feel the need to be polite to his imaginary friends. After a brief conversation, Plantinga left and on the way out one of the man’s assistants said, “We take good care of the professor because when he goes we all go.”http://www.fellowtravelerblog......plantinga/

Also see Plantinga’s “God and Other Minds”

Another interesting argument comes from the leading philosopher and Christian, Alvin Plantinga—he asked, what evidence does anyone have for the existence of other people’s minds? He argued cogently that the evidence for God is just as good as the evidence for other minds; and conversely, if there isn’t any evidence for God, then there is also no evidence that other minds exist—see God and Other Minds, Cornell University Press, repr. 1990.http://creation.com/atheism-is-more-rational

Verse and Quote:

John 1:1-4
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind

And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the “illusion” of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism (solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist)

Richard Conn Henry

No ba, I have not ignored this. In fact I have responded a numbered of times that the claim made in your first sentence (which I will note starts with “if”) is not a settled matter, and I have offered, several times, some reasons why not, as summarized in the quote I have offered by John Bell.

Furthermore, I have made numerous statements about how interpretation of QM is more metaphysics, and to use wjm’s phrase, provisional models as opposed to definitive conclusions.

You have not responded to these points, other than offering your typical laundry list of quotes. It is you who have ignored my points, not the other way around, I think.

jdk, regardless of what you think as an atheist, I find the evidence from quantum mechanics that the Mind of God precedes “material” reality to now be overwhelming.

Due to advances in quantum mechanics, the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:

1. Consciousness either precedes all of material reality or is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality.
2. If consciousness is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality then consciousness will be found to have no special position within material reality. Whereas conversely, if consciousness precedes material reality then consciousness will be found to have a special position within material reality.
3. Consciousness is found to have a special, even central, position within material reality.
4. Therefore, consciousness is found to precede material reality.

And given the constant bias that I have seen against God right here on UD, by atheists such as yourself, I am certainly not overly concerned whether you may personally find the evidence compelling or not.

For instance, you, as an atheist, believe, against all common sense, that unguided Darwinian processes provide a better explanation for the human brain than God does:

The Human Brain Is ‘Beyond Belief’ by Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. * – 2017
Excerpt: The human brain,, is an engineering marvel that evokes comments from researchers like “beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief”1 and “a world we had never imagined.”2,,,
Perfect Optimization
The scientists found that at multiple hierarchical levels in the whole brain, nerve cell clusters (ganglion), and even at the individual cell level, the positioning of neural units achieved a goal that human engineers strive for but find difficult to achieve—the perfect minimizing of connection costs among all the system’s components.,,,
Vast Computational Power
Researchers discovered that a single synapse is like a computer’s microprocessor containing both memory-storage and information-processing features.,,, Just one synapse alone can contain about 1,000 molecular-scale microprocessor units acting in a quantum computing environment. An average healthy human brain contains some 200 billion nerve cells connected to one another through hundreds of trillions of synapses. To put this in perspective, one of the researchers revealed that the study’s results showed a single human brain has more information processing units than all the computers, routers, and Internet connections on Earth.1,,,
Phenomenal Processing Speed
the processing speed of the brain had been greatly underrated. In a new research study, scientists found the brain is 10 times more active than previously believed.6,7,,,
The large number of dendritic spikes also means the brain has more than 100 times the computational capabilities than was previously believed.,,,
Petabyte-Level Memory Capacity
Our new measurements of the brain’s memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web.9,,,
Optimal Energy Efficiency
Stanford scientist who is helping develop computer brains for robots calculated that a computer processor functioning with the computational capacity of the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate properly. This is comparable to the output of a small hydroelectric power plant. As amazing as it may seem, the human brain requires only about 10 watts to function.11 ,,,
Multidimensional Processing
It is as if the brain reacts to a stimulus by building then razing a tower of multi-dimensional blocks, starting with rods (1D), then planks (2D), then cubes (3D), and then more complex geometries with 4D, 5D, etc. The progression of activity through the brain resembles a multi-dimensional sandcastle that materializes out of the sand and then disintegrates.13
He also said:
We found a world that we had never imagined. There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions.13,,,
Biophoton Brain Communication
Neurons contain many light-sensitive molecules such as porphyrin rings, flavinic, pyridinic rings, lipid chromophores, and aromatic amino acids. Even the mitochondria machines that produce energy inside cells contain several different light-responsive molecules called chromophores. This research suggests that light channeled by filamentous cellular structures called microtubules plays an important role in helping to coordinate activities in different regions of the brain.,,,https://www.icr.org/article/10186

And that is just one example of the irrational bias from atheists against God out of many I could have provided,,, To deny, as atheists constantly do, that God provides, by far, the best explanation for why the human brain exists, is, in my book, for the (internet) atheist to disqualify himself from reasonable conversation and to reveal himself as nothing other than a severely partisan troll.

Moreover, I find the ad hoc rationalizations of atheists against the clear Theistic implications of Quantum Mechanics to be, to put it mildly, desperate attempts to rationalize away what has been, as Dr. Henry pointed out, the glaringly obvious Theistic implications of Quantum Mechanics for 80 plus years now.

And last but not least, and to reiterate, for the atheist to deny the reality of his own immaterial mind and his own free will, which are both foundational presuppositions within quantum mechanics, is for them to commit intellectual suicide. (see bottom of post 27)

A few supplemental notes:

C.S. Lewis called the abject failure to be able to ground reasoning within the atheist’s naturalistic worldview ‘The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism’.
In the following article, Lewis further stated that ‘Naturalism,,, discredits our processes of reasoning or at least reduces their credit to such a humble level that it can no longer support Naturalism itself.’

The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism – C.S. Lewis
Excerpt: Thus a strict materialism refutes itself for the reason given long ago by Professor Haldane: ‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.’ (Possible Worlds, p. 209 – 1927)
But Naturalism, even if it is not purely materialistic, seems to me to involve the same difficulty, though in a somewhat less obvious form. It discredits our processes of reasoning or at least reduces their credit to such a humble level that it can no longer support Naturalism itself.
– Chapter Three of C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947)http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu...../csl3.html

The Transcendental Argument – July 20, 2016
Excerpt: The argument has been defended by apologists in several different ways. The way I often like to give it comes in the form of the following syllogism.
1: If we weren’t created by God, our reasoning faculties would be unreliable.
2: Our reasoning faculties are reliable.
3: Therefore, we were created by God.http://cerebralfaith.blogspot......ument.html

What Does Quantum Physics Have to Do with Free Will? – By Antoine Suarez – July 22, 2013
Excerpt: What is more, recent experiments are bringing to light that the experimenter’s free will and consciousness should be considered axioms (founding principles) of standard quantum physics theory. So for instance, in experiments involving “entanglement” (the phenomenon Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”), to conclude that quantum correlations of two particles are nonlocal (i.e. cannot be explained by signals traveling at velocity less than or equal to the speed of light), it is crucial to assume that the experimenter can make free choices, and is not constrained in what orientation he/she sets the measuring devices.
To understand these implications it is crucial to be aware that quantum physics is not only a description of the material and visible world around us, but also speaks about non-material influences coming from outside the space-time.,,,https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/content/what-does-quantum-physics-have-do-free-will